A Ray of Hope Amid the Climate Information War |
Climate advocates “worry they are losing the information war,” The New York Times reported this week. Climate disinformation is pervasive, and “only 21 of the nearly 200 countries that signed the Paris Agreement” signed a declaration at this year’s U.N. climate conference about trying to address that. While polls show the public is concerned about climate change, bogus claims about clean energy being unreliable or damaging are “steadily growing, amplified by social media,” and those urging policy responses to the climate crisis are increasingly “labeled ‘alarmists’ who propose radical solutions,” wrote reporters Lisa Friedman and Steven Lee Myers.
This is depressing, maddening stuff. TNR has been covering climate obstructionists’ transition from straightforward “denial” to these more elaborate forms of disinformation since at least 2020, and in recent years the problem has only gotten worse.
But I have a quibble: Climate advocates aren’t losing the information war. They’re losing the money and power war. That’s an important distinction—not least because it requires a different approach, one focused on radically curbing the influence of money in politics. And while losing the money and power war might seem even grimmer than losing the info war, there’s actually a ray of hope in all this.
It’s not just that 65 percent of Americans say they’re at least “somewhat worried” about climate change. Per the latest large-scale survey from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, 48 percent say people in the United States are being harmed “right now,” with 46 percent saying “they have personally experienced the effects of global warming.”
If you say you have “personally experienced the effects of global warming,” you are basing that in part on concrete experience—even if you can be influenced in how you interpret that experience. In the Obama years, the percentage of people who said they personally experienced the effects of global warming was in the 20s and 30s, but it has risen steadily since then, and in the 2020s has never dropped below 40 percent.
The experiences of climate change are going to become easier, not harder, to recognize in coming years. Perhaps the fossil fuel industry and its allies are pushing disinformation so wildly right now because they know this is an uphill battle. Arguably, they have already lost it. They cannot possibly win the information war when the information every day becomes more observable with the naked eye—and in people’s finances. Will people easily dismiss climate and affordability policy as “radical” as their homes tank in value, food and insurance costs spiral, and severe weather destroys their homes, finances, and lives? Maybe not.
Where climate obstructionists clearly are winning is the policy arena—the money, the power. The Trump administration is taking a sledgehammer to nearly every climate-friendly policy enacted by the prior administration. Tech titans and big banks are backing off their once-shiny promises to reduce their emissions, and the race to build more data centers for AI is slowing or even reversing the energy transition. Establishment Democrats are backing away from climate policy out of fear of losing elections to Republicans—even though there’s not a ton of evidence that this is a good strategy, and ample evidence for the opposite strategy.
What the climate obstructionists are also in danger of winning is the nihilism war. As Aaron Regunberg and other writers at TNR and elsewhere have pointed out, the fossil fuel industry is, to a certain extent, counting on people’s limited energy and constant discouragement. “Big Oil wants us to succumb to nihilism when it comes to climate change,” Aaron wrote last week. But they’re conspicuously nervous when people refuse to succumb. The moves that companies are now backing away from all emerged after the 2020 election, when people thought Democrats were going to get serious about climate change and media coverage of Greta Thunberg and others seemed to have shifted public opinion. Big companies were scared, and were hoping that flashy pledges could stave off more serious policy.
Fossil fuel interests still have a lot of power and options, of course: They can push for criminalizing protest; they can fund politicians friendly to their interests. They do this regularly, and it may yet prevent action on climate change coming in time to avert utter catastrophe. But when people start to revoke the fossil fuel industry’s so-called social license to operate—by making it socially unacceptable to work for, invest in, or promote planet-destroying polluters, and divesting from these products—that’s the stuff that seems to really unsettle the industry and its political allies. Hence right-wingers going all in on the risible idea that divesting from fossil fuels is a form of discrimination.
Again, the industry can leverage its considerable money on the spin machine (and it helps that it doesn’t seem to care how self-destructive its messaging may be to the wider society). But it’s up against considerable headwinds when it comes to human psychology and what people seem to care about.
Specifically, the industry’s arguments against climate policy have mostly leaned on two items: jobs and affordability. Democrats may have an edge over their more fossil fuel–friendly Republican opponents on energy affordability, and climate policy creates jobs too. More importantly, jobs aren’t the trump card they seem to be. Corny as it may sound, the numbers suggest that love matters more—by a lot. Last year, The New York Times reported on an international poll that found that “protecting the planet for the next generation” was by far the most popular argument for taking climate action—12 times more so than the “promise of creating jobs.”
“At the heart of this is love,” Anthony Leiserowitz, the director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, which conducted the study, told the Times. “People love particular people, places and things. And those people, places and things are being threatened.”
Obstructionists don’t have the advantage on all fronts. As Aaron recently wrote, there’s an easy answer to fossil fuel companies’ hope that you will tune out: “Disappoint them: Don’t give in.”
That’s how much homeowner’s insurance rates have increased in the past six years in Washington state. Two residents whose rates more than doubled are now suing Big Oil companies and the American Petroleum Institute, accusing the fossil fuel industry of driving these increases via severe weather events associated with climate change.
LA Wildfire Survivors Want to Rebuild All-Electric, but a Utility Is Using Customer Funds to Incentivize Gas Appliances
After January wildfires destroyed more than 18,000 buildings in Los Angeles, a growing movement of residents who lost their homes want to rebuild all-electric, recognizing that burning gas in household appliances contributes to the climate-driven increase in the destructiveness of wildfires. An attribution study found that climate change made the January fires 35 percent more likely.
But the country’s largest gas utility, SoCalGas, is using funds from its customers to incentivize wildfire survivors to rebuild with fossil gas instead of going electric.
The monopoly gas provider in Southern California is offering thousands of dollars’ worth of rebates to wildfire survivors who rebuild with gas appliances. The rebates are paid for by California utility ratepayers through a California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) energy efficiency program.
Read Hilary Beaumont’s full report at Inside Climate News.
This article first appeared in Life in a Warming World, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Heather Souvaine Horn. Sign up here.
You can’t throw a pacifier in American discourse without hitting someone talking about how having kids changed them. From Pete Buttigieg to Sarah Palin to the legions of guys who had daughters and realized sexual harassment is bad, many people apparently receive wisdom from parenthood they weren’t getting any other way.
This “as a parent…” talk can sound smug—which is weird, given that these moral revelations come from the humbling experience of having your ass handed to you daily by a creature the size of a marmot. I never thought I would be one of those people. But it’s true, parenthood has changed me in at least one way: I hate robots even more than I did before.
Last week, the internet lit up with giggles as one of Russia’s first humanoid robots was presented in Moscow, marching tentatively onstage to the Rocky theme song, only to face-plant and be hauled off by embarrassed handlers. The video made the rounds, even appearing on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.
I can’t laugh at this stuff. Instead, it enrages me.
Humanoid robots are the perfect symbol for the suicidal absurdity of the AI frenzy. What is the point of making a robot walk like a human—like a toddler for now, but eventually a grown adult? According to robotics industry publications, it’s so they can replace humans more easily. To borrow Nvidia’s creepy phrasing, “Our world is built for humans by humans.” So making a robot look like a human makes it easier to appropriate that world—sorry, “collaborate” with humans, as Nvidia puts it. Those metal toddlers want your job, particularly if you work in manufacturing.
Scratch that. The companies making these metal toddlers want all of our jobs. As Colbert noted, immediately after laughing at the downed robot, the top country song by digital sales last week was written by AI. Social media companies, meanwhile, think they’ve figured out a particularly good way to monetize this technology: AI-generated ads to sell you more stuff.
As Ketan Joshi recently wrote at TNR, “Meta’s push to force-feed advertising slop into every single corner of the massive digital space it controls could not have worse timing.” Despite the company’s stated intent to purchase “renewable energy certificates,” the projected energy needed to power generative AI is breathing new life into the gas and even the coal industry. It’s also pushing our electricity bills higher and higher.
Say any of this to a member of the AI cult, and you’ll inevitably hear something about how AI is going to help humans, not hurt them. It will save lives, they say, pointing to algorithms’ ability to process reams of medical data quickly. Or you get some kind of reheated West Wing monologue about how lots of lifesaving technologies were accidental by-products of other scientific inquiry, so “discovery” is inherently good.
This is the same logical fallacy deployed by the plastics industry, which argues against policies discouraging single-use plastic packaging by pointing to artificial heart valves. While that may sound convincing, it’s important to remember that these two things are not mutually exclusive—it’s like saying policies to reduce car usage will eradicate ambulances—and that this rhetoric is coming from people who make a profit from both products.
That’s why the humanoid robot is the perfect symbol. While algorithmic data crunching might have some good uses, the very expensive push to develop technology that more specifically replicates human skills—think bipedal walking, think creativity—is the world’s worst party trick. It’s slowing or even reversing the energy transition at a time when every extra emission brings us closer to crisis. It’s taking up vital resources like water and critical minerals. It’s creating a bubble that may soon crash the economy. It’s producing a lot of rubbish and misinformation. And it’s doing all of this for the sole purpose of making investors money by replacing human labor.
Those metal toddlers aren’t funny. They’re part of a multibillion-dollar project to make the future uninhabitable for actual toddlers.
That’s the average drop in home value for the 25 percent of the nation’s homes that are most vulnerable to hurricanes and wildfires, according to analysis from The New York Times. (It’s more than twice that for the most vulnerable 10 percent.)
First, the frogs died. Then people got sick.
Frog mortality used to be an academic curiosity. Then researchers realized it was driving a huge increase of malaria in humans. From the Post’s new series on the impact of biodiversity decline:
In the United States, researchers have shown that a collapse of insect-eating bat populations prompted farmers to use more pesticide on crops, which in turn led to a higher human infant mortality rate.
Around the Great Lakes, the reemergence of gray wolves has had the surprising effect of keeping motorists safe. The canines prowl along roads while hunting, spooking deer from crossing and reducing collisions with cars.
Also in North America, invasive emerald ash borers devastated ash trees, contributing to elevated temperatures and an increase in cardiovascular and respiratory deaths.
India may have witnessed the most astounding ecological breakdown of them all. After vultures experienced a mass die-off, the livestock carcasses they once scavenged piled up. Packs of feral dogs took the place of vultures, resulting in a rise in deaths from rabies.
Read Dino Grandoni’s and Melina Mara’s full report at The Washington Post.
This article first appeared in Life in a Warming World, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Heather Souvaine Horn. Sign up here.
All progressive eyes are on New York City this week, after democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani cruised to victory amid voter turnout not seen since the 1960s. New York City could now become a testing ground for left-wing policies including widespread rent control, free buses, universal childcare, public school rooftop solar, and public grocery stores.
TNR writers have previously written about how significant some of these could be as a form of climate policy, reducing emissions while helping offset the costs (for example, with food prices) associated with rising temperatures. But Mamdani may yet face stiff headwinds on getting these policies implemented. And that’s why another, far less publicized result on Tuesday night is significant: 200 miles to the north, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu secured the City Council seats she needed to proceed with an ambitious vision for climate and housing policy.
As The Boston Globe’s Sabrina Shankman noted this summer, Wu initially seemed slow to implement her lofty Green New Deal campaign proposals. But free bus routes, net-zero requirements for new buildings, and a “very, very detailed” and aggressive climate plan released this summer reversed that impression. She then won the September preliminary election so definitively that her competitor dropped out and Wu ran uncontested on Tuesday—a stunning result given that her opponent was extremely well funded and business interests and particularly the real estate industry don’t like Wu. That kind of stuff often sinks politicians in this country.
The one obvious check on Wu going forward would have been if she lost allies in the City Council elections on Tuesday, thus depriving her of majority votes for her policies. Instead, one of her closest and reportedly most precarious allies, Henry Santana, fended off a challenge from former District 3 councillor Frank Baker, ultimately securing a decisive victory, despite facing an—I kid you not—10-to-one campaign-coffer ratio in Baker’s favor as of August. Wu going all in supporting Santana seems to have made a difference.
It will be tempting for non–New Englanders to write this off, as they usually do, believing Massachusetts is so blue that nothing that happens there is relevant for politics elsewhere in the country. But progressive policies don’t always fly in Massachusetts, for the same reason they fail elsewhere. “Polls confirm that Bay State voters are resolutely progressive on a range of issues,” Robert Kuttner wrote in The American Prospect in 2023. “But on policy, Massachusetts continues to lag far behind other Democratic trifecta states. If you unpack why this is the case, you appreciate that it isn’t only right-wing Republicans who undermine both democracy and popular faith in democracy. It’s also corporate Democrats in one-party states.” At the wider state level, Kuttner argued, governors and legislators assiduously avoid pissing off the business lobby.
Granted, Boston is well to the left of the wider state. But there’s also another reason Wu cementing power is significant: Climate policy needs testing grounds.
This is why congestion pricing in NYC has been so closely watched by climate activists and so disproportionately attacked by the right, including President Trump, TNR’s Liza Featherstone argued in March. Not only do serious climate proposals—of which there are many, but precious few implemented in full—need pilot programs in American politics; in a world where the primary rhetorical attack on climate policies is that they’re unrealistic, expensive, and will make people’s day-to-day lives worse, successful ones offer proof of concept for cities, states, and countries everywhere. The right-wing obsession with congestion pricing is not an accident, Liza wrote, and it has implications far beyond even climate policy: “It’s important to them to stop this bold government solution to improve our lives because real solutions and positive experiences with government endanger the entire right-wing project.”
Michelle Wu now has the council majority needed to proceed with testing more of these policies. And she has it because she and her allies are somehow winning the battle against business interests. Boston’s election results won’t get top billing this week. But ignoring them would be a mistake.
This is the U.N.’s projection, released last week, on how much the Earth is expected to warm relative to preindustrial........